Is the Holiday Season called Christmas Time or Yuletide?

Johansen_Viggo_Radosne_Boże_NarodzenieIn English we have these two different terms for the coming holiday season: Christmas Time or yuletide. Christmas Time has a religious touch while yuletide is old English and resembles the term juletid still used in Scandinavia. Also notice that Christmas Time is two words (unless written as Christmastime) while yuletide is a compound word like common in Germanic language. And oh, Christmas Time must be written with upper case as first letters while yuletide doesn’t have to (unless maybe in a blog post title). I still struggle a lot with English grammar.

The holiday season may be seen as a religious celebration or, which I think has become prevailing, a special occasion for business. Yuletide is high activity in Business-to-Consumer (B2C) both for brick and mortar shops and for eCommerce, while Christmas Time is almost a stand still for Business-to-Business (B2B) as no one is able to make any decisions because it is the holiday season.

By the way: The only thing I wish for xmas is that people start to standardize on the terms used for the same concept. Not at least at Christmastide it is so disturbing when we don’t have any form of standardisation.

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2 thoughts on “Is the Holiday Season called Christmas Time or Yuletide?

  1. Michael D.'s avatar Michael D. 3rd November 2024 / 14:56

    Christmastime is one word, not two.

  2. Henrik Gabs Liliendahl's avatar Henrik Gabs Liliendahl 4th November 2024 / 08:39

    Thanks Michael for commenting on this old post. As a non native English speaker I was confused seeing it spelled both ways, thus the remark on unless written as christmastime, which then also gets a spelling correction in my setup. In my native language such words are always compound words.

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